Publisher bans authors for apparent plagiarism

Three authors have been banned from journals published by IGM Publication, including the Journal of Medical Science and Clinical Research.

The ban — a relatively infrequent occurrence in publishing — comes after the publisher removed a 2014 article that seems to have merely changed the title and authors of a 2013 article  from another journal.

When a tip from a reader pointed to the possibility of duplication between the two articles, Continue reading Publisher bans authors for apparent plagiarism

Top official at Indian university plagiarized most of paper

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A top official and law researcher at a university in India is facing dismissal after being charged with plagiarizing approximately three-quarters of one of her papers, among other allegations.

Chandra Krishnamurthy, the Vice Chancellor at Pondicherry University, has been “placed under ‘compulsory wait’ by the Union human resource ministry following several charges against her,” according to The Times of India.

A nine-month long investigation by the International Journal of Legal Information confirmed that the majority of one paper on Krishnamurthy’s CV, “Legal Education and Legal Profession in India,” was largely plagiarized.

Here’s the retraction note:
Continue reading Top official at Indian university plagiarized most of paper

Plagiarism count for mathematician updated to four papers

S00220396After we reported on a retraction for a 13-year old paper by Mohammed Aassila, a reader alerted us to two retractions and an editorial notice for the mathematician. Each of the notes is several years old.

That makes a total of four problematic papers for Aassila. Each is plagued by the same thing: plagiarism.

Here is the retraction note for “The influence of nonlocal nonlinearities on the long time behavior of solutions of diffusion problems,” published in the Journal of Differential Equations:

Continue reading Plagiarism count for mathematician updated to four papers

Lesson learned: “What makes a journal great?” essay pulled for plagiarism

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In 2011, a Nigerian journal published an essay entitled “What Makes a Journal Great” by its newly appointed editor, outlining his editorial philosophy — a philosophy that apparently includes lifting text from another source.

That’s right — the Nigerian Medical Journal is now retracting the essay by Francis A. Uba, a surgeon who currently is provost of the college of medicine at Benue State University, after discovering it bore a “close resemblance” to a previous article (euphemism alert):

Continue reading Lesson learned: “What makes a journal great?” essay pulled for plagiarism

Anti-fish oil researcher netted two more retractions

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Brian Peskin

Earlier this year, Food and Nutrition Sciences retracted two papers from an author who criticized highly popular fish oil supplements after an additional round of peer review concluded his papers present a “biased interpretation,” among other issues.

Last year, Brian Peskin lost a paper for an “undeclared competing interest” — namely, that he held patents and directed a company associated with essential fatty acids.

In place of fish oil, Peskin touts plant-based supplements for treating cardiovascular disease. From the abstract of the freshly-retracted “Why Fish Oil Fails to Prevent or Improve CVD: A 21st Century Analysis,” he claims that Parent Essential Oils (PEOs) — such as alpha-linolenic acid, which can be converted into the EPA and DHA found in fish oil — “fulfill fish oil’s failed promise”: Continue reading Anti-fish oil researcher netted two more retractions

Thirteen-year-old mathematics paper retracted for plagiarism

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A 2002 paper that investigates a kind of equation used to describe physical systems has been “has been detected to be a case of plagiarism.”

Here’s the abstract of the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Physics (Zeitschrift für angewandte Mathematik und Physik) article, “Some blow-up results for a generalized Ginzburg-Landau equation,”

We investigate the blow-up of the solution to a complex Ginzburg-Landau like equation in coupled with a Poisson equation in ϕ defined on the whole space nn=1 or 2.

What did this paper plagiarize from?  Continue reading Thirteen-year-old mathematics paper retracted for plagiarism

Gold nanoparticle paper crushed by “deliberate and fraudulent use of data”

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Biotechnology Letters has retracted a paper on a new gene delivery technique due to “the deliberate and fraudulent use of data in the paper that had previously appeared in other papers of these two authors.”

The journal’s Editor in Chief Colin Ratledge told us that someone tipped him off that one of the authors, University of Kalyani microbiologist Keka Sarkar, had been self-plagiarizing:

I can say that a person who was familiar with the work of Dr Sarkar got in touch with about their concerns about her publications and, in particular, her paper published in Biotechnology Letters.  They supplied a dossier of her publications showing the obvious duplications of figures and that she had been using the same figures in different papers to illustrate the results from supposedly different experiments.

He found that, indeed, multiple figures in the Biotechnology Letters had appeared in other publications of Sarkar’s, some prior to the paper’s October 2013 publication, and one after. The details are in the whole retraction note:
Continue reading Gold nanoparticle paper crushed by “deliberate and fraudulent use of data”

Paper on natural ways to fight cancer stem cells nixed for plagiarism

cover (1)Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents has retracted a 2015 review article about natural fighters of cancer stem cells for reproducing “content to a high degree of similarity without appropriate attribution or acknowledgement” from a handful of papers.

Although the editor and publisher pulled the paper, they did so with the cooperation of the authors, according to the retraction note: Continue reading Paper on natural ways to fight cancer stem cells nixed for plagiarism

“We copied verbatim”: Authors insist on retraction for their own spider paper

Journal of ArachnologyThe authors of a 2015 paper about non-native spider populations in Chile are retracting it from the Journal of Arachnology because they copied the introduction of a 2011 paper verbatim.

The retraction was triggered by the first author, who “insisted on a full retraction in lieu of milder remedies,” according to the journal’s editor-in-chief.

The paper, “Alien spiders in Chile: evaluating Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis,” tested Darwin’s hypothesis that introduced species that are phylogenetically distant from native animals are more likely to thrive. It was published in April. Authors Andrés Taucare-Ríos and Ramiro O. Bustamante are both based at the University of Chile in Santiago.

The notice reads:

Continue reading “We copied verbatim”: Authors insist on retraction for their own spider paper

Serbian journal cleans house with 16 retractions and 2 corrections after investigation

Archives of Biological SciencesEditors at the Archives of Biological Sciences, the official journal of Serbian Biological Society, have unleashed a flood of retractions and corrections as part of an effort to fix the mistakes of the former editorial board.

The fixes 16 retractions and two corrections, by our count are in response to a formal investigation that took place last year, and ended with a call for a two-year suspension of the journal’s funding and the resignation of key management figures, including the editor-in-chief, Božidar Ćurčić (who resigned after the announcement).

Goran Poznanović, the new editor-in-chief at ABS, told us that the journal is invested in cleaning up past mistakes and will investigate every request.

Continue reading Serbian journal cleans house with 16 retractions and 2 corrections after investigation